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Sarah Barrington
  • About
  • Research / Projects
  • In The News
  • Publications
  • CV
  • GITHUB
  • Contact

I’m Sarah, an Engineer, AI researcher, and Ph.D. candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information (supervised by Professor Hany Farid). My research interests span signal processing, synthetic media detection, and digital forensics. My work has been featured at the Nobel Prize Summit, discussed at the White House and on NPR, recognized by the United Nations, and published in Nature Scientific Reports among other academic venues. 

Previously, I graduated from the University of Cambridge, UK, with First Class Honors in General & Manufacturing Engineering (BA, MEng, MA), before working at McLaren Formula 1 as an Associate Engineer & Data Scientist in the Modeling & Decision Sciences function. I have since co-founded two technology start-ups, the latter of which was successfully acquired in 2019.

I am a Graduate Fellow at the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab, a Research Scholar at the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and a UC Berkeley Fellowship Awardee. I have previously held the US-UK Fulbright Award for Data and Analytics, Scholarship Visionary of the Year award (IMechE), James Clayton Undergraduate Scholarship (IMechE), and both the Ann Jemima Clough and Eleanor Sidgwick Prizes for academic excellence and dissertation performance respectively (Newnham College, University of Cambridge).

Outside of academia: I am working towards my Private Pilot License, I climb and hike in beautiful places (including in Yosemite Valley!), and I try to go to as many Formula 1 races as I can. I also bake for a wonderful local charity called Cake4Kids. And by the way… I am British, with the accent to match!

LATEST WORK

Featured
Op Ed: OpenAI Closing Its One-Stop AI Slop Shop Sora Is a Cautionary Tale
October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington
Op Ed: OpenAI Closing Its One-Stop AI Slop Shop Sora Is a Cautionary Tale
October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington

There's a lot to be learned from the cautionary tale of Sora. What does this mean for generative AI, and what about traditional social media?

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October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington
CVPR 2026: presenting 3 papers & hosting the APAI workshop
October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington
CVPR 2026: presenting 3 papers & hosting the APAI workshop
October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington

A lot of fun at CVPR this year. Hosted the Authenticity & Provenance in gen AI (APAI) workshop, alongside presenting 3 new papers from our lab.

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October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington
Keynote Panel - The AI Arms Race, West Coast Anti-Money Laundering Forum
October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington
Keynote Panel - The AI Arms Race, West Coast Anti-Money Laundering Forum
October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington
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October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington
Talking Voice Cloning and David Attenborough with Spotify/The Ringer
October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington
Talking Voice Cloning and David Attenborough with Spotify/The Ringer
October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington

When David Attenborough’s voice was AI-cloned and used to promote misleading political and conflict zone content, it raised deeper questions about identity and the cultural significance of a voice.

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October 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington
Discussing AI-Powered Scams on WKBW ABC
January 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington
Discussing AI-Powered Scams on WKBW ABC
January 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington

In our latest study, humans perceived the identity of an AI-generated voice to be the same as its real counterpart 80% of the time. So what do we do about it? I was glad to talk to WKBW-TV ABC News about the common scams people are experiencing every day through these technologies and how we can look out for them.

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January 2, 2026
Sarah Barrington
My Interview With NBC
November 28, 2025
Sarah Barrington
My Interview With NBC
November 28, 2025
Sarah Barrington

Our audio deepfakes study on NBC News! An absolute pleasure to sit down with Senior Investigative Reporter, Bigad Shaban (who, by the way, is awesome to work with), and discuss all thing deepfakes and AI-powered voice clones, and the post-truth era. Bigad even tried to do the same 'real vs. fake' voice quiz that we gave to our study participants and did no better than guessing!

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November 28, 2025
Sarah Barrington
Writing for Tech Policy Press: AI is Not Too Unprecedented to Regulate
November 28, 2025
Sarah Barrington
Writing for Tech Policy Press: AI is Not Too Unprecedented to Regulate
November 28, 2025
Sarah Barrington

Is generative AI too new or unprecendented to regulate? In my latest article published in Tech Policy Press, I argue ‘no’. While some elements of generative AI are genuinely new, and the inner workings of these models are extremely complex, the harms it enables are evolutions of those we have seen before.

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November 28, 2025
Sarah Barrington
Hosting Our First APAI Workshop at ICCV25
October 31, 2025
Sarah Barrington
Hosting Our First APAI Workshop at ICCV25
October 31, 2025
Sarah Barrington

Hosted our Authenticity & Provenance in the Age of generative AI (APAI) workshop at ICCV25 in Honolulu this year. Had a fantastic range of papers and talks, from watermarking NeRFs to semantically-aligned VLM-based deepfake detection; and many great entries to our SAFE Synthetic Video Detection Challenge 2025.

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October 31, 2025
Sarah Barrington

CONTACT

LinkedIn // GitHub // Google Scholar // Email // Academic

Berkeley, California // London, United Kingdom

 

SARAH BARRINGTON